In 2014, Anthony founded his own wholesale company, making a bold move into the real estate market. As his career progressed, he expanded his horizons by diversifying into rental properties. Around 2020, he took the leap to expand his wholesale business into multiple virtual markets.
In 2014, Anthony founded his own wholesale company, making a bold move into the real estate market. As his career progressed, he expanded his horizons by diversifying into rental properties. Around 2020, he took the leap to expand his wholesale business into multiple virtual markets.
All right, everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Game Changers show. I'm your host, Mike McKay, based in the Jacksonville, Florida market. And each and every week we do this show with people who are changing the game of real estate all over the country. And if anyone's in the Jacksonville, Northeast Florida market or thinking about getting into it, feel free to reach out to us. If you need us to point you in the right direction of anything and we still are a very active buyer in the Jacksonville area, especially of mobile homes on land recently. So feel free to send any deals our way as well. So this week on the show out of St. Louis, we have Anthony Price. Anthony, welcome to the show.
Anthony:Hey, thank you very much. Thanks for having me ready to talk some real estate.
Mike:Yeah, man. So, for the people who don't know you, can you give us a little bit of background of how you got into real estate and then kind of how that led you to where you are today?
Anthony:Oh God. Being broke. That's what led me into real estate working 12 hour shifts at a hospital back in the day, 10 years ago. And then just, getting laid off. That was when the market was a little bit. different back then, but, getting laid off constantly trying to find a job in a lifestyle. And, just got tired of working for pennies, hourly and busting my butt. And I said, I got to do something better. So I just went off and started doing some research on different career opportunities. And I remember, I was jobless. I was living with family at the time, here I am in my younger twenties. And I didn't feel like a man. I'm not growing, I'm building an empire or anything like that. I was in my younger twenties. I, didn't have any kids at that time. I wasn't married at that time. And I remember a family member kind of saying, well, Anthony, you always talked about real estate. Why don't you look into being a real estate agent? And I said, you know what? You're right. So I got on YouTube back then, 10 years ago, and this was like 2012. And I started Googling how to be a real estate agent and how to get my license. What's it going to cost? What do I have to do? And I lived in a very small town 10 years ago, probably a population of around 800 in the middle of, BFE Missouri and. It was a 30 minute drive to go to Walmart to buy groceries, but anyways, small town. So I'm like, how am I going to do real estate in this small town? So I thought, well, there was a brief moment where I did live in St. Louis. Maybe I'll move back there. I only lived there for maybe a year at one time. And maybe I'll go back there and be a real estate agent. And St. Louis was probably about an hour and a half away from me. And I remember while I was doing my research, I came across a video, somewhere on there. I'm sure a lot of us have come across something like that when we first started. It was like, make 10, 000 in 7 days or something like that. And it was an old video by Sean Terry, and I'm sure a lot of people here know who Sean Terry is. And I just happened to click on it, and I was like, this is not gonna work. This is a scam, this is some kind of pyramid thing. And I clicked on it. And thank God I did. And I seriously say that, thank God, because that changed my life that the rabbit hole that I went down for the next two months changed my life with learning wholesaling and financial freedom. And I'm just being able to build my own empire for me and my family and not build somebody else's empire, not build on somebody else's wealth and retirement, but build on your own wealth and your own retirement. And, I started, about two months after really digging into every video I could find on it, the topics, the, how to talk to sellers, how contracts works. I Just. I emailed a bunch of, people I could find online other real estate investors in the St. Louis area. That's where I was or I was wanting to go. Cause that was the biggest market next to me. And I just said, Hey guys, if you need an apprentice, if you need somebody to help you like talk to sellers, find deals, please let me know. I will work for you. I was willing to work for free. So I emailed probably four different real estate investors and one got back to me and said, you know what? I am looking for help. It's really funny that you happen to reach out right now. But let's talk, why don't you drive up here next week and we'll talk. So I did, and long story short there. I worked for that person for the next year and a half shadowing under him, finding him deals. Mostly the deals I found were off the MLS, just kind of, perusing the daily listings and being the glorified acquisitions manager for the company there. And I would find deals on the MLS and we would wholesale them. About a year and a half after that went off on my own. And here I am 10 years later. Yeah, this doing strictly wholesaling. I can't say strictly I do rental property as well. I got a handful of rental just to kind of build the the empire on the side, so to speak, build that cashflow up. I don't know if I'll be wholesaling until I'm 80. So I'd like to have something there as far as cashflow. Right. As well as my family and kids, when they get older, something to kind of leave down a legacy. But primarily wholesaling for the last 10 years and love it.
Mike:Yeah, so you must have seen a lot of changes happen in the industry over the course of the last 10 years. What are some points that you had to, adapt to things changing in the industry or the market? Thank you.
Anthony:Oh god. I mean you probably know a lot as well, but just in 10 years it is like you just the evolution of real estate of wholesaling, has Changed a lot when I got started Kind of funny how it comes back around to sometimes, like cold calling could be the best thing And then, in two years it dies off and new regulations come out and pound it into the ground and you can't do it anymore. then all of a sudden, you couple of years later, it's the best thing again. But, back in my day, it was still a lot of cold calling direct mail was really hot and popular back then. Oh, bandit signs. That's what it was. I remember signs being the hot topic. Everyone, was coaching and teaching about how to put out bandit signs on a Friday night. Leave them out over the weekend, pick them back up on Sunday. did a lot of bandit signs back in the day and got some deals from that. But seen a lot of changes as far as marketing. And you really have to pay attention to those changes. A lot of it has to do with like, regulations around a certain topic. For instance, you're doing cold calling, you pay attention to what new phone regulations are coming out with that. If you're doing, texting, as we all know lately, lot of regulations around that. That used to be the biggest thing. the last probably four years. And then all of a sudden that just got hit with a huge hammer and, you that just pretty much went down to almost zero. But staying on top of your toes as far as different sort of marketing channels that are working and not working. What's your response rates? I've seen a lot of that as well as just regulations around real estate, like for instance, we're close to the Illinois 10 years ago. You didn't have to have a license in the state of Illinois to wholesale, right? Now you do. Same thing with the city of Philadelphia. Same thing with Oklahoma, right? I don't know the ins and outs of Oklahoma, but I just heard that you have to have something there in Oklahoma, right? So just, you have to really pay attention with certain marketing strategies and then regulations around where it'll say, as long as you focused on that and you really know, and you know how to pivot you'll do great.
Mike:And at a certain point, we were talking offline and, you at one point decided to not wholesale just locally. You decided to go national over, not quite national but close, like what, what made you decide to make that decision?
Anthony:Yeah, so that was a result of things shifting again. The my core market was always St. Louis and St. Louis has been a blessing to me and we have done Phenomenal in St. Louis for years just over the last three years. I've started noticing a shift of Marketing just becoming less effective. Certain marketing channels like direct mail, you used to get a pretty good response rate and that just got, I mean, you're lucky if you get a 0. 2%, which means if you send out what a thousand postcards and you get, what is that? 20 calls. I think that's 0. 2%. That's good. And so, direct mail kind of died off a lot of other things have died off competition grew because, now we're really going into the social media era and things like that. So there's a lot of people out there talking about what we do and it's just getting more popular. So more competition. St. Louis is not a really big Metro. I think it's probably what, like somewhere in top 50, I think. on the smaller side of a big Metro. So. Like I was saying though, over the last three years, I've noticed a slowdown in deals and response rates seller motivation because they're just constantly getting barraged by different people here. And so I was sitting down one day and I was thinking like, I need to find solution to this. I need to figure out what do we need to do to grow so I don't, you go out of business. So I started looking into, going national or semi national. And then my decision was not to really go national, but just going to a couple of good handful of core markets. And that's kind of what I suggest to people. You can go national and there's nothing wrong with going national. There's a lot of really. smart, intelligent people that are national that really utilize PPC to go national. I know a lot of people that have a lot of success with doing their core market, wherever you live, if you live in Dallas and do Dallas, but after you outgrow Dallas and maybe you're looking for more, maybe you go into Austin, or if you're in LA, maybe you go into San Francisco like that. And you just focus on your state, every core Metro in your state until you basically dominate that area. And you just keep running out of leads. You can't handle it anymore or you need more to lead flow, then go into another city. And that's exactly what, that's exactly what I did. So, right now we're not fully national, but we are quote unquote, semi national, I guess you could say. And we're probably in about eight markets, nine markets. Has been a blessing. As soon as I went into some other major markets, it was just deal after deal. Thank God. And really turned my business around. I mean, we went. Back to being very busy again, doing multiple, wholesale deals every month consistently, four or five deals. It's been a great decision because of that.
Mike:Yeah, what do you see here? Some of the areas where people end up struggling when they decide to go outside of their local area.
Anthony:So what are the struggles with going out of your, their backyard?
Mike:Yeah. And how did you overcome those, some of those struggles?
Anthony:Yeah. So one, the obvious one is. If you go into another market, where do you go? Meaning like what zip codes do you target? What areas do you just target the whole city? Do you target certain counties? What do you do? What I did is just, I would, let's say again, Dallas, for example, when you want to go into Dallas, I would look at a map of Dallas online. I would first look at what are the counties of Dallas? Is Dallas one, just one big county, or is there multiple counties? That I need to pull. So if I was going to go on a, some sort of online system to buy a list, right, I need to know what counties I'm going to be targeting or what zip codes I would target. So first thing I do is I write down Dallas on a piece of paper and then I'll write down, okay, so I got Dallas. How, what counties are in Dallas? Okay. I got this county and I got this county and this county. Okay, great. Then I would go a little bit deeper and I just say, okay, these are all the zip codes in this and then I do a little bit of research as to what are the lower end areas of that particular city, maybe houses under 100, 000. What are the higher ends? I kind of want to stay somewhere in the middle there. And those are the areas of target. So I would say the biggest challenge is just knowing what areas to target when you do go into an area, it's not the biggest deal. It's actually pretty simple just to do that. Just to do a little bit of research. You don't just want to run and gun and jump in there. Done that before. Don't want to do that, but. a little bit of research you'll be fine. Another thing is what kind of marketing you want to do. Say if you're really into direct mail in your primary market and you want to go into another market, don't, you probably can't really do direct mail because, you're hitting a list of 20, people in your core market, your home market. And you're going into another market with another 30, 40, 000 maybe people that you could hit. Well, that's going to probably cost you 20, 30 grand a month in direct mail. So you really have to make sure if you're going to go national or semi national, what kind of marketing channels you can do that are sustainable. You can grow and not really bankrupt you in case you have a poor month. I'm in eight markets, you could do direct mail in eight markets. It would probably cost you 100, 000 to 200, 000 month if you wanted to do just direct mail. So you probably have to rely on something else, like either the telephone to do cold calling or texting or online to do PPC, Google pay per click or one of those channels. And that's what we did. And utilize that pretty well to go into those other markets. So that way it's cost effective. can reach the sellers. There has been challenges as I've told you before, you with regulations around anything to do with telephone right now, you have to be very careful of any new laws and regulations because what works one day with the telephone might not work next day with the telephone. So you really have to make sure you're on your toes when you do any sort of marketing with a telecom. That's for sure. anOther challenge has just been knowing the local legislation around certain things. Like I said, Illinois, you have to have a real estate license in order to wholesale more than one property a year in Illinois. From my understanding now, you can wholesale one, but more than one, you have to have a license. so If I was going to go into Illinois, say I was going to start in Chicago, I would know, Hey, I gotta, have a real estate license to go into Illinois. Certain title companies, for instance, like say in Texas, they don't allow certain things in your contracts or they won't abide by them. So you just have to know that.
Mike:What's an example of that? What wouldn't they allow in your contract and.
Anthony:Well, a big thing we're seeing now is attorney in facts and if you don't know what an attorney in fact is, basically it just means the seller gives you permission to do a limited something regarding the property that you have under contract. So for instance, we sometimes will get an attorney in fact sign MLS. So of course we have a core list of cash buyers in every market. But for instance, if we sent out a property and maybe we're just not getting many hits on it and it's just not selling, we'll put it on the MLS. Cause that's the biggest prebuilt buyers list, right? If you put a property on the MLS, it's already a buyer's list built for you. Ready to go. Good chance they're probably going to sell it if it's close to being a deal. So in order to do that though, some states. Not all, some you just have to have a contract and you can list anything you want. They call it owner by contract. Some, you have to have an attorney in fact, signed, or in the contract, a clause, an attorney in fact clause that says, buyer has the right to list properties or sign any addendums or sign any listing agreements etc. And then you're able to put it on, the local MLS there with some sort of either a local broker that does that flat fee listings or go on to use a flat fee listing site and do it yourself. But we've noticed, or I have noticed that some municipalities are kind of saying you can't have attorney of fact, we don't care that you have a signed attorney of fact, it's kind of crazy. It's literally right there saying the seller gives me permission, they signed it, but they won't accept it. And so some of them said, well, you can do it, but it can't be in the contract. The attorney in fact has to be a separate piece of paper outside of the contract. Signed, then we'll accept it. Some have even told us, we're not even accepting them anymore. We're just not doing it, just because, unfortunately, bad apples, and every industry ruins good things for some people, and, that's just part of it. But but yeah.
Mike:Got it. And then it is like the MLS that usually gives you pushback. Is that the person who's giving you pushback on to, like, we won't accept a listing agreement signed by an attorney? In fact, or it's someone else or.
Anthony:Yeah, mean, it's the local MLS board in that area, for instance, in parts of Texas. esPecially around the Houston area they have changed, they used to be able to just have a signed contract and be able to post a property on MLS, just owner by contract. And this is a perfect example, but they switched it and said, well, you have to have a signed contract, but you also have to have a attorney in fact slash power of attorney, one or the other. It's kind of the same thing, kind of not. Pretty similar, a limited power of attorney or attorney. In fact, for that property to list it on the MLS. So that worked for a while, but now they're now around, especially around the Houston area, attorney, in fact, can't be in the contract. It has to be a third party signed document outside of the contract. That gives you permission to basically do a flat fee listing and then you can do it. We'll see how long that lasts until they basically cut that out. then you have to do something else. But yeah, pretty much they just want, real estate license, real estate agents to post properties on the MLS. If they see people doing it, they usually throw a fit. And then, broker that listed your property can get flagged. And it's kind of a mess when it shouldn't really be a mess. You should be able to list a property on the MLS. If have a legitimate contract on it, but again, we don't write, we don't make the rules. NAR does sometimes, or most of the times when it comes to real estate. So we'll, we'll see. Yeah.
Mike:And then like, that is something that people do talk about when they're going into different markets, or at least that I've heard that the disposition part can be a struggle. How do you guys handle it? You said you have buyers listen in all these different areas
Anthony:yeah. One of the easiest way to dispo your deals, when you go into a new market, everyone's on Facebook, right? So you just get on Facebook and you use the search bar and you just search up Dallas real estate investor group. And you'll see Dallas is huge. So you'll probably see about 10 different, 12 different groups. And then what I do is I just join the top biggest ones, some of these groups tend to be a lot of spam, a lot of people from different countries just in their spam and stuff and products. But if you can find a good one that is just really hardcore real estate investors, they don't let a lot of spam in. Those are the ones that I like to join. And if you get a property under contract, a good deal, you just post it in there and it'll sell. So that's like a prebuilt buyers list ready to go for you. did that, when I was in Nashville a little bit. The first thing I did when I went out and I was in the Nashville market was join all the Nashville Facebook groups. Immediately, boom, there's your buyers list. Okay, great. So that gives me a good leg up on everyone else. The second thing I do is I pull a list of all real estate agents in that area. And there's several different softwares that can do that. But basically I just pull a big list of all the real estate agents in that area, bam, that's another instant cash buyers list because real estate agents have cash buyers, right? That's the second thing I do. And then the third thing I do in that same Facebook group is I will gather all the emails that I see from other buyers saying, Hey, send me your deal. So whether I pay a VA to do it, to scrape all the emails into like an Excel sheet and put it in my buyers list where I do it. We do that and we'll get a couple, you maybe 500, 000 emails real quick doing it that way as well. And then the fourth way is if you still get a deal and you post it in the Facebook group, you send it out to your real estate agent list then you can post it on the local MLS in that area, but make sure you Hey, do I have the right documentation to be able to post it on the MLS? And you can just easily ask a local, you broker or the flat fee agent company that you're going to post with. Dispo is actually really easy now compared to how it was 10 years ago. 10 years ago it was, had to go up to the only real virtual thing was like, meetup. com. And I used to go in there and post properties and that and stuff like that. And actually sold a lot of deals starting out. But luckily with all the new softwares and stuff, sound like I'm 80 years old, but the new softwares that these kids have nowadays. Gotten a lot easier just to do anything. Pull seller list, pull buyer's list pull data. I mean, it's so much easier. The hardest thing right now, honestly, it's not the wholesaling part of it or, or anything like that. It's just the marketing. You really have to stay on top of your marketing and what's working and what's not working. That has been the number one thing to really watch out for in Pivot is your marketing channel, you don't rely on just one marketing channel because if that goes down, you're going to be screwed. So. It's like, that story about like, if you have one fishing pole and that fishing pole breaks, you're out of fish and you're going to go hungry. But if you're catching fish with four or five, six different fishing poles. It's, in one of those fishing poles happens to break you're not going to be hungry. So, always try to diversify and have different marketing channels and you'll be okay.
Mike:Yeah, and then how do you vet all these buyers so quickly? Right? You're sending out an email, you probably get a lot of interest back and you're not local to the market. I mean, like in Jacksonville, I know most of the players, right? Right. But. If I were to go to St. Louis, I wouldn't know where to start. I wouldn't know who's legitimate and who's not like, do you have a process behind that?
Anthony:Yeah, pretty much the only process, and we try 000 non refundable earnest money. And that's how we easily, go between who's serious and who's not. Because if somebody just messages us and says, Hey, you want this property and you here's a hundred dollars earnest money. We're not going to be able to do that because they're just, could walk away and then we're screwed. The person that we're buying the property from or wholesaling it from, right. Is, we have to explain to them what happened, why the buyer walked away. Well, 5, 000 non refundable earnest money up front, and then that helps weed out a lot of people and that has honestly been the best way of rooting people out. And we always, as well as asking them, Hey, are you a cash buyer? Do you have funds? Are you using your own cash funds? Are you going to be using a hard money lender or private lender? We do ask those questions, but it's not as hard as you think. Just making sure they put down a good enough, uh, EMD deposit for your deals to make sure that they're serious and they're really going to close on your deal. So you're not, you left up the creek without a paddle. You'll be fine. Yeah,
Mike:Yeah. But do you end up having a lot of, kind of look, you lose, like, go out to the property or, like, how do you screen that? Because I guess, as sellers are selling it usually because it's, like, easy, right? They don't want 30 people parading through, or maybe you guys have a different strategy.
Anthony:yeah. For owner occupied, that's a little bit of an issue, right? If the house is occupied by a tenant or the owner, then yeah, you kind of wanna limit that down. If, we had 20 people that wanted to look at a house, we would do it, but we would do it in a certain timeframe. I would call the owner and say, Hey we're gonna come over between one and two, just for like an hour or two is gonna be complete chaos. Just want to give you a heads up on that. And then we'll just do it in that one or two hour span instead of you know Maybe over the period of all week or something if it's vacant then it's not that big a deal If you have 20 30 buyers that want to look at your property, basically verify. Yes. You're a cash buyer. Yes, you're serious and then we always make sure we have their the full name Their first and last name their email address their phone number We have a running list of who's looking at our properties at what day what time? we keep track of that list for several reasons one in case somebody goes in there and does something that's the number one thing we always think of like What if the buyer that I don't even know goes into the property and takes the refrigerator? I've never had that happen in 10 years But if it does happen, I have a list of hey john smith looked at the property at two o'clock on saturday And the fridge was gone. Okay, that's a pretty good chance. I know who did it. I've never had that happen primarily I keep a running list of who's looking at the property because Just like you follow up with your sellers. I follow up with my buyers We follow immediately the next day if we haven't heard from them on an offer Hey, just wanted to reach out and see if you made it over to the wholesale property at 1 2 3 Main Street gonna be accepting an offer soon. What's your highest and best as soon as you can close? And that's what we message them just to see if they got an offer Prepared for us and we get a lot of offers that way too because sometimes you have to follow up with buyers just as much as sellers Because they get busy, or they forget, or they're running their numbers, and then, things happen in life, but yeah, I've never had an issue with just building a massive, my thing is, and this is always up for debate, but some people swear, you just have five or ten good buyers, and then you just send them out, and you basically, sell them to them and that's it, and I'm more along the model of, I like to build the biggest, baddest buyers list I can, for several reasons. One, it gives me a really good chance of selling the deal, because I get more eyeballs on it. If you have 10 buyers and I have 10, 000 buyers, I'm going to have a way higher chance of selling that same deal. Now the second benefit to that is I can probably sell my deals for a higher amount than you can with 10 buyers. So if I had 10, 000 buyers, can sell it for usually a higher price because I have more eyeballs on it. I have more competition. And that's always been a great benefit is just building the biggest buyers list you can.
Mike:Yeah, for sure. And then, so now you guys said, like, you're doing a mixture of PPC, but you also are still doing some of the telephone marketing in these different markets
Anthony:Yeah. I haven't really been. Too big on PPC over the last few years until recently because was in just one market. And when you're in one market only and you're doing PPC in one market only, you're going to pay a lot. You're going to pay quite a bit. I remember when I used to just do PPC in St. Louis and it would cost me probably about four or five hundred dollars per lead. Per conversion. So you pay per click and then that person goes to your website, right? And then you have to hope that out of that click they actually fill out the form and go through the process, right? So probably, depending on what your click rate is and your conversion rate let's say it takes 20 clicks to get a conversion. And if it took you, 10 a click, you paid 200 for that conversion. you have to kind of compare that to what are you spending in direct mail and other marketing channels to see if it's worth it. But anyways. When we were just doing that in St. Louis in one market, it was astronomical. And I said, I can't do this. The first month I spent a couple thousand, nothing came out of it. And I tested it for six months and there's just nothing I could do get that cost down. But when you do PPC in multiple markets, you have more eyeballs on your ads. And you get more clicks, which brings down your cost per conversion, which makes it way better to do when you're in multiple marketing, or multiple markets. And so now that I'm in multiple markets, I ramped it back up, and we're seeing a really good increase in, in lead flow with being in multiple markets versus just doing PPC in one market.
Mike:I've never really done PVC. Are you able to target those zip codes there. I feel like someone told me once they had rules around, like, you got to be a certain radius or something like that?
Anthony:Yeah, you can target per state. You can target the whole state, the whole country, the whole county, the whole city. I think you can target, I think you can target zip codes. know Facebook was the one that you couldn't. Facebook used to be really good, used to be a really good marketing channel a couple years back, probably three or four. We were getting tons of leads every day from Facebook marketing. And then again, they switch one thing and it died like pretty much that week. And it was all because you couldn't target based on the zip code. So on Facebook, have to either target the entire county state. Or that's it. You couldn't pinpoint where you wanted to go. So if there were bad areas of town that you wanted to stay out of there's nothing you can do about it. With Google, you can get a little bit more granular. I think you can exclude zip codes and things like that. So you can get a little bit more targeted and they have way better, you options and stuff. But yeah, you can get pretty granular with Google as well as retargeting campaigns, which we do which has been great.
Mike:Yeah, is that like, retargeting? You guys do like YouTube ads or you just see the banner ads or.
Anthony:there's different ways of retargeting. There's display ad retargeting, and then there's, Google has started this new thing called Max Performance Campaign, which basically, just like you said, is where you can retarget basically the entire everything. Like, if someone clicks on your website and they go off your website, they'll be able to see your ad on, in their email, on YouTube, on Google. I mean, it just tracks the heck out of you no matter where you go and it's like super, super retargeting Which we've tested and it works pretty good tested that along with normal retargeting which basically just tracks you every time you're on Google if you're on Google again, you'll, it'll just randomly show up or something. But this new retargeting method that Google came out with, it actually like shows up everywhere pretty good. Our cost per conversion with that has been pretty darn good. I think that's like under 50 a lead, which is good. I mean, the old, the rule of thumb is pretty much any lead under a hundred dollars is pretty good. I mean, direct mail. It used to be 100 per lead. And now that has gone up to what, like 150, 200 per lead. It's insane right now.
Mike:Man, more than that in Jacksonville,
Anthony:Oh, is it? Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure.
Mike:about four to six hundred, yeah,
Anthony:See, and it's just like, you can't scale with that. And then people say, well, if that's why you only target maybe pre for closure, do you niche down with your direct mail? Yeah, that's true. But better make sure you're getting some deals because if you just spent eight grand on direct mail, you have to get one deal to make that up. And then any deal after that is profit. So again, that goes back to just making sure you have more than one marketing channel because all of a sudden you're doing great with direct mail one. And I used to be a big direct mail person, big. Back in the day, I think I was doing 500, 000 a year just on direct mail alone, that one marketing channel. And then all of a sudden, boom. I mean, the response rate went down and, 500, 000 one year with direct mail to 200, 000 to 100, 000 and to 80, 000. And it's just like, Oh my gosh. And if you don't track that, can be in trouble.
Mike:Yeah, for sure. What percentage of what do you guys do now is like PPC versus the phone outbound marketing channels.
Anthony:So PPC, I'm still testing. I'm still in the process of getting it dialed in. It's been good. When I say dialed in, I don't mean like, Oh, it's been horrible. And I'm trying to dial it in. No, it's been good. just need to dial in what areas we want to target better. started out pretty broad with it, you targeting whole entire counties and metros and things and in different cities. Because the easy thing with PPC is you can literally press a couple of buttons and boom, you can target an area of the United States. You don't have to really, you buy this list and research this and then send direct mail. I mean, it's really a couple of clicks once you know what you're doing and you can target any metro in in the, the world pretty much. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's been great. It's just. would say PPC spending about 3, 000 a month, which really isn't anything, compared to some people out there. 3, 000 is pretty modest, it's about 100 a day, which is not terrible. We see a couple leads a day from that. Looked at, looking to double that here. Yeah, my cost per conversion right now is about 50, 50 to 60 a lead, which is good. Which is good. Remember when I first started and I was in one market, it was about four or 500 lead, an actual conversion. I got it. Finally, I got it dialed in to 50 or 60. So I've got it dialed in pretty good. Now I was just being more targeted. Now I'm looking at what leads are coming in? Are they owner occupied leads more so? Are they absentee owners? Are they houses with tenants? they houses where the sellers keep filling out our form and they want full retail because maybe their agent isn't able to sell it on the market? We've gotten quite a few of those where they just want full retail, right? That's the only thing about PPC is you can't really dial in who you're targeting. You can target an area, not the person per se with direct mail and cold calling and things like that. You can really dial it in. But the motivation is less with PPC. The motivation is high, but you can't dial it in as far as who you're targeting. So sometimes we'll get a call, we'll get a lead from Google and there's a lot of motivation, but it's in the middle of the woods and it's a small shack and there's literally nothing we can do with it because there's no comps and everything else. We, we've gotten quite a few of those, which is something you just live with and you have to see what you can do about it to dial in those leads a little bit more.
Mike:What have you done to dial it in over the course, like the last year or two to get down to that 50 a lead, but also make sure, like, the leads are. That are converting.
Anthony:Yeah. It's just going into more than one or two markets. Because if you're in one or two markets, again, that's just going to bring your costs. Like, you're in Tampa. If you started PPC in Tampa it'd probably be, I think it would probably be pretty high. Cause Tampa is a good market. It's pretty competitive. And, if I was in Tampa, I would probably look to go out a little bit more, maybe go into some of the other major metros around me, like maybe Miami or uh, what's the other ones, maybe Jackson is Jacksonville pretty big.
Mike:Pretty big, like, what area or like,
Anthony:yeah,
Mike:sized,
Anthony:basically,
Mike:and a half in the metro.
Anthony:Oh, that's, yeah, that's really good. Yeah. So anything, especially over 500, 000, I would probably look at it targeting.
Mike:Okay.
Anthony:Yeah. That's a good rule of thumb that I followed is, as anything that has a population of over 500, 000 is pretty good. I know people that target anything over really 250, 000, which is fine. When you start to get around 100, 000, that's when it gets a little small for me, but I know people that really crush it in small towns as well. But you have to really make sure you know a lot of the laws and regulations as far as listing it on the MLS because there's going to be less buyers in those areas. So you're going to have to list a lot of those type of properties on the local MLS in that area. you need to make sure you have all that, correct documentation. It's not anything to worry about. You just need to make sure you know how to do it.
Mike:Yeah, for sure. What are you seeing in terms of conversion rates on, you're paying 50 bucks a lead, like from PPC. How many leads are you seeing to a contract?
Anthony:iT depends on the city and the area, but pull it up, they're usually you'll get about one deal out of every I would say average somewhere between 10 25, depending on how good you are at closing, I would say in that area. So I would say about average it out about 15 leads,
Mike:pretty great, like 750 bucks a deal. I mean, that's
Anthony:that, yeah. And that's just for me. It could be completely different if you're in Arizona, say you're in Phoenix and you're in Phoenix, LA and San Francisco. It might take you 50. But we're not in those markets. Those markets are very competitive. Maybe in the future, but not right now.
Mike:Gotcha. And we were talking like a little bit offline about like kind of, you were dabbling in, or maybe you've gone into like the novation strategy and you've kind of talked here about the paper, special paperwork to get on the MLS, have you dove into that strategy a lot or
Anthony:No, I'll be a a hundred percent transparent on that. I have not done any innovations. That's just something I'm looking to add on the side for my primary wholesaling business is add innovation. It's just like adding rental property is just another avenue to keep, make sure you're diversified a little bit more. So just like I have done wholesaling in the last 10 years and I've done rental properties in the last, well, since 2000, what, 16, 17, I bought rental property just single family homes around the areas that I like. Just adding that novation channel where you can get a property under contract and then sell it to a retail finance buyer. That's unbelievable. Have everything in place. I have everything in place to do it. We haven't done it yet because the CRM that we use, we have to kind of go in there and edit things and edit a lot of our workflows to now file when you follow up with people, you got to follow up with them a little bit different, especially if you made them a cash offer and then you also made them a novation offer. I changed a lot of things around and this was just over the last couple of months. And next year, we're really looking to kind of start cranking out some novation deals to really help out with marketing channels. Because if you're doing wholesale deals, that's great. But you're also doing one or two novation deals a month, that really helps everything. I mean, if you add another deal or two a month, I mean, that just helps everything, especially say, for instance, you're doing direct mail and direct mail costs a lot of money. But if you can pull a novation deal because, they're a little bit easier to get accepted because with novation offers, you can offer more for properties if they're in good condition. mean, that's great. That's phenomenal. So that's something I'm excited the next year coming up. That's kind on the bucket list, New Year's resolution, all that stuff. You have to pay attention to the local regulations as far as what you can list on the MLS, what paperwork you need to list on the MLS, because those deals you're going to be selling primarily on the MLS. So you have to make sure you know how to list it on the MLS, whether that requires you just to have it under contract which is the absolute easiest. Whether you have an attorney in fact clause built into your contract that gives you the right to specifically list it and it has to say the words, gives permission to list the property on the MLS, like sign documents, sign addendums, sign, offers etc. Or, like I said earlier in this show, you have to have a third party piece of paper on the side, signed, and sometimes you have to even go so far as to have that notarized by a mobile notary or something with the seller. As well, some of them, one of them even notarized. So just knowing all that.
Mike:Yeah. Gotcha. Oh, so what does your team look like
Anthony:My team. Yeah, that's a great question. So, 10 years ago when I started, I was doing everything on my own. of the people that are probably watching this, they're still doing that and that is that's great. wouldn't be where I'm at if I didn't do everything on my own. I, you some people get in trouble because they. outsource too fast when you should really know at least, basics of what you're doing so you can pivot when it's time. I've seen a lot of people start and then go out of business because of market shifts because of marketing shifts. And, really staying on top of that is key. And when I started 10 years ago, I used to stay on the phones from, golly man, I used to wake up, be on the phone from 8am to sometimes 6, 7, 8 o'clock at night, Monday through Monday, doing deals on the weekends just so I can, you make a living. was behind, when I started, I was behind like, Almost 20, 000 in student loan debt. was behind two months, maybe even three months behind on my apartment rents. Two months behind in utilities getting ready to get shut off. Couldn't afford groceries. My girlfriend at the time now my wife, my lovely wife was buying me groceries. When we just met, 10 years ago I couldn't even afford dog food for my dog at that time. And, you here I was at 8 a. m. to 8 p. m. making calls. learning the business, learning the ropes for the first, probably until 2015 or 16, when I finally hired my first virtual assistant. So question that I'm getting to what's your team look like it's all VAs. It's a hundred percent VAs. One of your other questions before this was, you what things have you saw a shift in? One of the biggest shifts I've seen in just the last 10 years of doing this, and you probably have seen this too was back in the day, everyone used to teach. The brick, I call it the brick and mortar style of this business, which is you buy an office location or you rent an office location. You hire an acquisitions manager, you hired a dispositions manager, you hired your lead manager and everybody was in house or the in house model is what you can call it. Remember that everyone was teaching that way of wholesaling or that way of doing real estate, whether you were flipping or wholesaling, whatever, but it was, you had to buy it, you had to rent. An office building, have everyone come in house. You had a couple acquisitions, manager, Dispo, lead managers, all the whole nine yards, that was the way to do it. Instead of doing that, it was easier for me just to hire a VA basically to at least get me off the calls every day, you so that way it free up my time to work on the business and not in the business so much. And that was a game changer. As soon as I hired my first virtual assistant. really helped. So now I can focus on, let's, okay, let's grow, instead of being on the phone from 8 a. m. to 8 p. m., can look into different marketing channels. I can look into better contracts. I can look into better scaling better scripts, better things to, you just more things that are more valuable to my time than being on the phone with a bunch of unmotivated sellers at times, right? So today I have seven virtual assistants all in the Philippines, wonderful job. They basically talk to sellers every day, all day long, as much as possible, getting information so we can make an offer over the phone. So I'm a hundred percent virtual. used to be a time when I was just in my own backyard. I used to go out to every property, look at every property. Everything's done a hundred percent online, a hundred percent virtual with all of my VAs. Before that I did, there was a brief moment in there where I did, I think this was probably four years ago, five years ago, where I did try to, you have a store front and all that stuff. Had an acquisitions manager. I was gonna, I was getting right in the middle of hiring a secretary. And for me, that just wasn't me. I liked being at home. I like drinking my own coffee, using my own bathroom, eating my own food. Playing with the dog whenever I wanted to play with the dog. Was just a lot more comfortable for me and I didn't want to be forced to go into the office at 7, 8am making sure everyone's at work on time. Everyone's doing what they're supposed to be doing. wanted more of a virtual lifestyle and I'm glad I did it. not for everyone. I know a lot of successful people that are still doing the in house model, crushing it. Because if you're doing face to face. With the sellers, you're going to get a a lot of deals because you're able to sit on the couch with them and really build a rapport. The good thing about being virtual though, is you're really quick. So I can literally talk to a seller on the phone, pull up some comps to make an offer on the phone and have that property on a contract in 10 minutes. So there's pros and cons of being virtual and there's pros and cons of in house wholesaling or in house real estate investing. That's why I went a hundred percent virtual. So we do everything from signing the contract to taking photos. We find a local boots on the ground in that market. We use certain companies to actually go out and put lock boxes on properties for us. I mean, it is way easier to be virtual now more than ever than how it was back in the day.
Mike:And so like your V. A. S. Are they mostly doing like the cold calling? Are they also doing kind of like the lead management or some of them even like closing?
Anthony:Yeah. Yeah. So, I have three or four VAs, primarily just talking to sellers. All day, every day, Monday through Friday from basically eight or nine in the morning to six o'clock at night. And that's all we do. So whether the sellers are calling us from our Outbound mark or inbound marketing like PPC or direct mail and they're calling into our system our, my VAs are talking to those people as well as we're doing outbound marketing like cold calling or text Or what's some other sort of, what, any other outbound marketing they're talking to those people as well. Then once they talk to the seller, they're getting, basically the four pillars. The timeline, condition, motivation, and their price, they're asking price. Once we get all four of those pieces of information, we pass that along to either me or my team leader, who will look over the information. Then we determine, okay, what is the property worth? Can we even make an offer on it? Is it an area that we can do something with it? And then we'll make it a virtual offer or verbal offer on the phone, which is great.
Mike:then is your goal, I assume, like, a lot of people who do it virtually is to get the contract right on that phone call if possible. Is that
Anthony:Yeah, obviously with us being 100 percent virtual, we want to try to get it locked up under contract on the phone. We don't want to try to get off the phone and have, people think about it or call competition. got to remember some of these marketing channels, especially like PPC. If they called you, you're calling someone else, right? I mean, if you have a plumbing issue, and you get it on Google, you're probably not just gonna stop at number one. You're probably gonna call at least two or three other, websites that you come across. So, our goal is always to try to get it. Under contract that day it comes in always especially if they're motivated. They're ready to sell They're within our price. I mean, we're gonna try as hard as we can to lock it up You know be a DocuSign or something.
Mike:Sure. What's your sales process on that call or your kind of strategy?
Anthony:Seen if we can make an offer on it based on the location the condition them a call back my VA Um, has a script that she follows verbal offer on the phone. It has all the rebuttals and everything that she needs to, answer any questions as far as how does the, the title process work? What title company do you use? If they have questions about the lock box, things like that, have a list of all the rebuttals, the common rebuttals or objections we come across, and then if the seller says no that's fine, we'll put them on followup status and follow them typically a couple of times a month. For pretty much forever, to be honest with you Which we do, but uh, follow up with them constantly, would say probably 70, 80 percent of my deals at least come from follow up and a lot of people's deals come from follow up. So follow up is a huge part of the business, huge part of the business. That's where most of our deals come from. But some of them do get accepted immediately on the call and then we'll just send them a docu sign, try to get them the sign right there. Or within the day and send it over to title company.
Mike:Yeah.
Anthony:Yeah.
Mike:Gotcha. And so you do have like your VA is making offers, like yeah, that's
Anthony:Yeah. Yeah. So sometimes I'll make an offer. Sometimes I'll make an offer. Most of the time though, it is my team of VAs. have a designated acquisitions manager slash team leader that I've trained on how to just. Follow the script, how to make offers, how to answer common objections that I've worked with. And then, yeah, so my VA does make the offers if if I need to step in, I'll step in. But for the most part it's I mean, it's pretty simple. It's once you have a good script to follow, you can make offers over the phone pretty easily.
Mike:Yeah, and how are you finding all these VAs you seem to have a lot of success finding good people?
Anthony:Yeah. Yeah. Good question. So, you, there's various websites out there where you can look at and put job ads for VAs. There's actually different ways you can hire VAs. Number one is you hire it through a third party, like maybe good example of that would be Upwork. So Upwork is you go up there, you can post a job. And you can actually hire them for however many hours you need, or pretty much indefinitely, but you pay Upwork and then Upwork pays that va, so they don't really work for you. They work for Upwork. That's kinda like a third party hiring process. I like to hire VAs that work directly for me, for my company, so I have a little bit more control over, just the daily activities and how just the workflow goes and everything like that. So like to actually use other sites like either virtual real estate assistance Facebook groups. And basically you just get on Facebook like you're looking for local real estate groups, like I mentioned earlier, and you just type in real estate virtual assistants or Philippine real estate, virtual assistants. And there's a, I mean, huge mega groups out there for just tons of VAs the Philippines that do real estate virtual assistants or VA jobs and stuff like that. And I post job ads in there looking to hire directly as well as another great resource for that is online jobs pH. Have you ever heard
Mike:so yeah, probably a few people off there. Yeah.
Anthony:Yeah, there you go. Yeah. So onlinejob. ph is another good one. think there's another one too, and I forgot that the name escapes me. I forgot what the name is, but it's very similar to online jobs. I forgot what it was, but there's another one out there. Basically, you just post a job ad. Hey, we're looking for a team leader or we're looking for a lead processor or lead manager, and then just post your job ad, how much you're going to pay an hour, what kind of incentives you want to give if you give incentives. And then do their, the only caveat to that is you're doing the reviewing yourself, right? You're doing the, you interview them, you review their resume, you interview them, you kind of go through the process. good thing about using a third party, like maybe Upwork or something, is you don't really have to mess with that too much. They do all that pre screening stuff. But I like to hire a director. It's worked out a lot better when I can have them to work directly for my company.
Mike:Yeah, is there anything in particular you're looking for, like, during that hiring process, especially for the people who are on, like, the sales side?
Anthony:Yeah. Usually I like to look for a high D or high I personality. And if you don't know what that is, that basically the disc test D I S C the disc test Tony Robbins came out with that. So it's just a personality test. And based off of your answers, they'll assign you a personality score based on D for driver. you're very direct and assertive I for influence, I believe. Very chatty, talkative that those make great VAs when they have a high I personality or D because Ds like to basically they're competitive. They like to hit their numbers they like to get stuff done only thing with high Ds is they don't listen very well And so sometimes you got to do some coaching with that, right? Is are very talkative. They're very bubbly they're great people to talk to. We just hired someone with a high I On my team. She's amazing. She's out of the gate. She's talking to sellers, getting tons of reviews every day. I call them when a review, just so you know, just so you know, is. When we get all the information, the, about the condition, the timeline, motivation, and price, they put it on review status in my CRM. And that just basically sends a task or a flag. Hey, got all the information on this lead. Someone needs to review it to determine the ARV and offer. So she's getting tons of reviews every day. just with that personality type. And then you have S which is, I think, steady. they're more system oriented. They like, steady workflows. They don't really like to have a lot of variety and sporadicness, which is not, they can work. I've hired S's in the past, but they tend to be a little bit more reserved. And then C is for conscientious. And those are very, basically analytical, very analytical people. That's probably where I'm at. I'm somewhere in between a C and a D. It's like, I like to get things done, but I also have to like overanalyze the heck out of it. So it takes me a little bit sometimes to get it done and it just kills me. So it's like I'm conflict of interest. I would say, yeah, high D's and high I's is who I like to look for when I hire a VA. Someone that's very, just very nice, very personable, very chatty. I mean, obviously you don't really need a personality test to determine, Hey, is this person talkative? Are they easy to talk to? Whenever you interview a VA, just get, you get that feeling, that gut feeling like, wow, it's really easy to talk to this person. You don't hire them. You know what I mean? You get somebody that's very quiet. Very like you have to force them to talk. That's probably not a sign that you know They're not gonna work out talking to hundreds of people every day in and day out You know Can they do they have that? Mental fortitude to really handle objections and sellers and all the things that we deal with talking to people.
Mike:Sure. Yeah, for sure. That's a good point. Well, we're getting close to the end here. And there's always two questions I like to ask at the end. First is a little fun one, which is what is the craziest or most uncomfortable situation that you have ever experienced in a real estate deal?
Anthony:Oh, man ten years Ten years. I'm sure there's been a lot nothing really comes to mind But what we can tell the audience here is a recent deal that me and you actually did together, which was great. I wouldn't say it was uncomfortable, but it was definitely had a really good happy ending for all of us. And it was a property where I just happened to get under contract in Florida in your home market. And this is before we even knew each other. I forgot how we got this lead, but got it under contract. It was a beautiful house and in the part of Florida and got it under contract. The seller was married, but it didn't tell us he was married and it's fine. We'll just get the spouse's information and give them a call and get their signature. But this was a little bit of an interesting deal where we had, okay, you're married. We understand that. So we have to have the wife's signature then. Okay, sure. Yeah. So we finally get that information and then we have to chase her down to get her information. We were calling her and trying to get ahold of her and trying to communicate with the husband and the wife for a couple of months. Oh, and to put everything on top of this, it was in pre foreclosure. This house was getting ready to go up for auction. So we had to basically get ahold of the lender, get ahold of the bank and give them a copy of our purchase agreement. And basically ask them, please do not foreclose on this property. We're going to buy the property. We just need you to extend the foreclosure date. So you give us enough time to close on us. OK, so we had to provide them with a copy of the purchase agreement. Luckily we were able to do that because I think the house was going to go to a pre foreclosure in like two weeks and we just had enough time to basically stall it out. they would push the closing date back for like, I think they, three months or something. buT then the title company got back back with us after doing that saying Hey, Anthony, we just let you know, there's a memorandum file against this property. And I said, really? Okay. Well, I've always know what it is, but I'm like of 10 years of doing this, I have never actually came across where somebody has filed a memorandum on a property that I had previously. So I was like, okay, that's interesting. So, luckily the title company and our TC that we work with was able to find the information of the person that had the memorandum because they're going to have that when they file it, right? Whenever you file a memorandum, the person puts their information usually on that memorandum. So the title company can get ahold of them and say, Hey, What do you need? What's going on here? Right? Lo and behold, that was you. You were the person with the memorandum. And if you want to tell the people, so what happened on your side, we'll get back to where I was. So we have this property under contract. We find out that there's a random and I'm going to pick up the phone and give you a call and say, basically just see what the situation is. Why is there a memorandum on the property? What's going on with it? What, you see what we can do here. So, what's your side of that? Yeah.
Mike:under contract two years before, and the husband and wife, we ran the same issue. Guy didn't say he was married. Right. And then we did get, the, we ultimately were able to get in touch with the wife two years before and the day before closing, she changed her mind, literally closing statement was prepped, we were ready to go. And I said, okay, well at the time she. Wasn't going to play ball at all. I even went all the way to Daytona to knock on her door, to have a conversation with her. So I just said, okay, just put a memorandum on it. Maybe it'll come back at some point or another. And then I knew, uh, at the time we were using the same TC company actually. So Anissa who used to work there was like, Hey, I saw your company on another file that came through. Can I give the guy your cell phone number? I was like, sure. Which file? He's like, she's like cranberry. And I'm like, Yeah, that's been two years. So yeah. So then I got your call and we just kind of work something out. I mean, we were going to flip it. So there was still, margin to be made on a flip. So we just kind of bought it off you at that point.
Anthony:Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. So you had it under contract to buy the wife flakes on you the day of closing, which is horrible, right? I mean, that's horrible for any, anybody. If I was in your shoes, I would have filed a memorandum as well because you put a lot of time and effort into that property and you want to make sure that you're still able to buy that property. Right. didn't know that. So years later that same husband calls us wants to sell the property. I don't know if he knew that there was a memorandum on it or not. We certainly didn't know because he didn't disclose that. I'm probably not going to know. title company found it. So luckily we had your information. I gave you a call and you had to have been the nicest person about it. Luckily, because it was my first time kind of dealing with the situation, basically my plan was just that, Hey, I'm going to call this other investor, see what the story is, and probably I'll have to either just walk away from it after spending three or four months on this deal, working it and paying my TC and my team to work this file. And I'll just probably have to walk away with it or from it. Right. But I called you up and basically you were nice enough to say, Hey man, I realized all the value in everything that you did. We still want to buy it. We'd be your buyer. As long as you finish everything with stall the pre foreclosure, you get everything wrapped up with title, you get the wife, the sign, the wife that walked away from us, we will still pay you an assignment fee. And we were able to walk out of there with a great assignment fee and close the deal. It was a win for the sellers. It was a win for me. It was a win for you. And that was one of my craziest stories, it had a really good ending to it.
Mike:Yeah,
Anthony:why I'm doing this show,
Mike:that's actually. And then I was like, Hey, you want to be on the show? Yeah.
Anthony:because of that deal.
Mike:And actually, the crazy part about that deal too, was when Anissa reached out to me and she was like, Hey, can I give you his number? I was like, yeah, sure. I was like I can't imagine he has it under contract for like less than I did like two years ago. Like the market's improved, quite a bit. And she's like, heck. She's like, what'd you have it at? I'm like, I don't know, lemme check. And I can't remember like one 40 something, 1 42, 1 43, I don't know. And I, and she's like, yeah, he got you beat. I'm like, and the, my words outta my mouth were good
Anthony:Ha. Well, yeah, I forgot what I had it for. I think I had it for oh man, did I have it under 100, 000? Or did I have it at like
Mike:I thought it was 1 35 or 1 25. I don't remember. It was just a funny story.
Anthony:Yep, so you were the buyer, this buyer behind the scenes with this memorandum. And it shows, even when you think a deal's dead, always, you don't ever just throw it away. Always ask the title company, What can I do? What can we do to get this done? And basically they just said, you have to call the person with the memorandum and see if you can work something out. And I said, Hey, worst case scenario is he says no. And then I'm just, you where I was going to be anyways. Right. So I told you everything. Hey, there's some pre foreclosure. We the pre stopped the pre foreclosure. a great deal, then that's when you basically said, well, we'll still buy it. And I said, well, I'll sell it to you. And it worked out great. So it really did because, I called you, you said you want to buy it. And I'm like, well actually, this is perfect because have a buyer ready to go to buy this property. I don't have to worry about all the stuff with finding a buyer in another virtual market that we're really not focused on. And I can just sell it to complete the process with it. And it was a great ending to it.
Mike:Yeah and I think I already walked to two years ago and I was like, I had to send me the updated photos. I don't need to see the inside. And he sent to me like, God, it looks good enough. Looks about the same. He was a clean, normal dude. Wasn't doing crazy stuff in there.
Anthony:and you went on to rehab it. Is
Mike:Yeah. So it's going to hit the market by next week. So we'll see how it does, but I think it'll be good. I like that area still in Jacksonville. So,
Anthony:That house was nice. That was a clean, at least from the photos and everything that we had on it, it was a clean property, it was nice looked great it would have been a great rental or flip, I'm sure.
Mike:Yeah. Original plan a couple of years ago. That was when the hedge funds were crazy in Jacksonville and that was going to go to a hedge fund. It was going to be just painted and touched up and see if that is fun. But now it's obviously getting a bigger renovation than that. It goes to show you right. Just like pick up the phone and ask, right? I mean, I've actually Had a couple of things come up with memorandums and I've just picked up the phone and called the other person and I'm trying to think if I've never had one not work out actually, yeah, I mean, I've only done like maybe four of them like that, but it's just, yeah, I don't know. I think most people realize that, like, getting some piece of a deal, as long as there's enough where it's not too much risk is better than nothing, right?
Anthony:Yeah. When you've been doing it for as long as probably me and you have been doing it, you kind of realize the value that the other person, especially on a deal like that, where it was in pre foreclosure and the wife didn't sign and you things are just chaos and you're like, man, I will pay you, even though we have a memorandum on it, I will pay you. If you're able to get this deal closed. Yeah. If you can close this deal, we will allow you to make some money on it. And you could have easily said, no, we have a memorandum. We're going to walk away or you're going to have to walk away. We're not going to pay you anything and we're just going to take it back under contract. And you could have easily done that, but you didn't. And this goes to show you, there are great people out there. There really are. And you can really work out some great partnerships.
Mike:Yeah, for sure, man. So, the last question that I have is for the newer people who are listening to the show. If you could go back in time 10 years when you were looking for that 1st deal, knowing what, now, what would you tell yourself?
Anthony:Oh, was looking for that first deal. I would probably tell myself to keep that same determination, tenacity. Don't give up because this process does work. There's people out there that only have to make 10 calls and they get a deal. Sometimes you have to make a thousand calls and you'll get your first deal. That's just how the dice go. Just have that desire to want more in life. To, you make your family better to leave a legacy not build on somebody else's retirement or somebody else's legacy. You're wanting to do this for your own family. Luckily back then I did have that mindset of I'm just gonna make this work. I'm just gonna do this and gonna make it work. I'm tired of being broke. I'm tired of always scraping for money. I'm tired of having to sleep on a family member's couch, you because, got laid off from a job. I want to leave a legacy for my kids that I know I'm going to have someday. And I'm glad that I had that determination to keep going, to keep making those calls through all those no's and those angry sellers that would just, yell at you. Whenever you're doing the cold calling and stuff like that, that I used to do. And I just had that tenacity to keep pushing and keep pushing and now, have three small little kids that I love and dearly. I have multiple rental properties. I have a full blown wholesale business virtually. can work in my home office anytime I want. My life has been such a blessing because of that determination and the things that I went through. It's where I'm at.
Mike:Yeah that's an awesome piece of advice. So if people wanted to get in touch with you after the show, or if they had any questions, how can they go about reaching out to you?
Anthony:Yeah. So I have a Facebook group strictly for real estate wholesaling. It's called wholesaling houses mastery can search for it on Facebook again, that's wholesaling houses mastery. It's a group for networking with other wholesalers around the nation talking about strategies and marketing and buyers and sellers and posting deals. So join that if you're interested. I also have a website. Strictly with a bunch of resources for wholesaling called wholesalinghousesmastery. com. have free scripts, resources lead scripts, calculators. Future courses are going to be coming out on that site. I'm very happy that I have that finally completed. Been a long process. coaching. It's great. I might change the name to anthonyprice. com. So if you're watching this at a later date, I might change the name from wholesalinghousesmastery. com to anthonyprice.com. So keep in mind if that doesn't work by the time you're watching this, but it's a great resource nonetheless. Reach out if you guys need anything, love to talk real estate.
Mike:Cool. man. Well, thanks for being on the show. This is great.
Anthony:Appreciate it. Anytime.